Question

I’ve been unable to find a plug-in or tool that would allow me to export my Gmail Inbox emails based on a search term like “baseball”.

Ultimately I want to export all of the emails to a PDF.

I have not found many options, one I looked at was MailExporter, but it doesn’t seem to have the search capacity I need.

Answer 1

There are many options out there. It’s just a matter of finding which one meets your requirements and works in your environment. I don’t think you will find a plug-in or solution that does exactly what you want. Most likely, you will have to piecemeal a few solutions together.

Export Gmail messages to text or HTML files – this WebApps question provides some good suggestions. I pulled out the more relevant answers.

• got-your-back – Got Your Back: Gmail Backup

  Selective Backups With Gmail Searching

  GYB supports selective backups using Gmail style mailbox searches. For
  example, suppose you wanted to only backup important or starred
  messages:

  gyb --email [e-mail] --search "is:important OR is:starred"
  

  would cause GYB to only backup messages matching that search query.
  Virtually any Gmail search will work with GYB.

• via https://webapps.stackexchange.com/a/493

  Use a local POP client, [I suggest] Thunderbird. Outlook uses a proprietary format for its local data store.

  Emails are saved as plain text files, one file per folder.

  This is the right answer, except use IMAP so you can pull out all the messages with a specific tag (tags will appear as folders under the [Gmail] folder). Also, if you have a lot of email, turn on the “Advanced IMAP Controls” Labs feature, then, under “Manage Labels”, turn off IMAP access for all the folders except the one you want to download.

Other Options – slightly limited based on your requirements.

• Thunderbird solution via this plug-in.
• http://www.mailstore.com/en/mailstore-home.aspx
• http://www.gmail-backup.com/